Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast where every week we talk about a different topic to help you navigate the ups and the downs of your job today and take control of your career in the future.

This week we're focusing on negotiation and you're going to hear my conversation with negotiation expert and ex-fbi

hostage negotiator Chris Voss. He's also the author of a brilliant book called Never Split

the Difference and he applies his ideas, tools and techniques all across the world,

whether it's teaching students at places like Harvard or working with organisations and teams to

help them with practical negotiation skills. What I particularly enjoyed about my conversation with

Chris is that his ideas felt very grounded in the real world and I could imagine myself using

everything that we talked about. So we started off by chatting about how having the right mindset really impacts

our negotiations and the difference between what he describes as positive and negative emotions.

And then we talk about loads of tools. So thinking about things like calibrated questions,

the difference between wondering and knowing, which was a particular

standout moment for me because that just really resonated as we were chatting that through.

And the importance of practicing your late night DJ tone and how that can be useful if you're

just trying to stay calm and collected in perhaps a particularly difficult negotiation.

If you do have a lot of negotiations as part of your job or perhaps you've got an important negotiation coming up, it might be worth

grabbing a copy of Chris's book as in the appendix he outlines how to prepare what he calls

your negotiation one sheet. And this really helps you to prepare for a negotiation. And he says that preparation

yields about a seven to one rate of return. And I really like that that negotiation one sheet really

distills all his ideas and his thinking into one place and really help to, I think,

think things through before you get started. So I hope you enjoy

today's episode. As a reminder, you can now get all of the podcast resources that we produce. So

the pod sheets, the pod notes, in one place by signing up to the weekly pod mail and the link is in the

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